Kim Jong Il Looking At Things

Kim Jong Il Looking At Things collects and republishes photographs appropriated from the North Korean Central News Agency, all showing the country's late leader in the act of inspecting something, usually flanked by an entourage of military officers and advisers who appear alternately fawning and anxious. João Rocha, an advertising art director in Lisbon, began posting the images to a Tumblr blog in October 2010 under flat, matter-of-fact captions such as "looking at blue rods" or "looking at a DVD labeling machine," and the blog became one of the most shared and imitated single-subject Tumblrs of its era. This book gathers the images into a bilingual English/French hardcover, published in Jean Boîte Éditions' Follow Me: Collecting Images Today collection, which treats online image-collecting itself as a curatorial practice. It includes an essay by visual-culture writer Marco Bohr, "Looking at Kim Jong-Il Looking at Things," which examines how the project's refusal to editorialize, its captions withhold judgment and don't try to be funny, is exactly what let the images spread and take on a life as internet memes.